Re: Co-chair meeting minutes: October 11, 2022 [via Music Notation Community Group]

Hi Jörg,

Thanks for your message, and for introducing yourself to the community group. I can provide you with a couple of quick answers:

1. The brackets and numbers that appear in voltas (or repeat endings) are not encoded by SMuFL; you can end up with quite complex textual instructions tucked into those brackets, so we concluded it is better to simply use regular text from a normal text font to represent those; and we chose not to encode the brackets themselves, since they have many of the same kinds of problems of any “spanning” event that needs to adjust according to the spacing of the music, which is tricky to do purely in a font. It’s therefore recommended to draw repeat endings fully using primitives and strings from regular text fonts.

2. The slots in SMuFL for encoding slur starts and ends etc. were brought over from the original Music Notation range in Unicode, of which SMuFL is designed to be a superset. To my knowledge, no font has ever attempted an implementation of these characters, whether in their location in the Music Notation range or in their corresponding location in SMuFL. I’m afraid the heavy lifting of calculating and rendering beams, ties and slurs is left to application developers to handle.

In terms of whether your text format might find a home in the W3C Music Notation CG in future, it’s certainly possible: our incoming co-chair Myke Cuthbert has proposed that the CG might be the home for the text format he co-created that represents Roman numeral harmony/chord descriptions, and this is something that we will consider in due course. We haven’t made any further determinations on this subject at the moment, but the door is at least open for the discussion.

All the best,

Daniel

From: Hohwiller, Jörg <joerg.hohwiller@googlemail.com>
Date: Monday, 7 November 2022 at 09:22
To: public-music-notation@w3.org <public-music-notation@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Co-chair meeting minutes: October 11, 2022 [via Music Notation Community Group]
Dear music-notation group,

I am an open-source developer (as well as professional software
developer and architect) and musician and just joined this group to get
some exchange and help.

After contributing to open source music software like OpenSongTabletApp,
I decided to implement a true open-source app for android tablet devices
supporting musicians with full fledged scores and auto-scolling, midi
playback and so forth. As a fan of simple markup languages like AsciiDoc
and ChordPro, I stumbled over ABC and did some experiments. However,
used to the simplicity of ChordPro I wanted use this as a starting point
but extend it with concepts of ABC. So I created a format called
MusicDoc and started forming an Open-Source project around it that can
be found here:

https://musicdoc.github.io/

I already implemented a model for songs and their score with
stave-systems, staves, clef, metre, voices, rests, notes, all kind of
decorations, slurs, ties, bars and all the complex things that music has
to offer. I can already read and write different formats like ABC,
MusicDoc, OpenSong from/to that model. I also plan to support MusicXML
as well as Midi what will also keep me busy many weekends in the future.

Currently I am working on rendering the model to graphics (music sheet).
To make my code re-uasble I started creating a rendering engine that can
do the complex layout computation as an abstract reusable renderer that
I can then reuse for Android SDK graphics, JavaFx, or generation of PDF
or SVG. While I am just starting with this and fortunately stumbled over
SMuFL that I decided to use, I collected quite some questions that I
want to ask here and hope to find some answers:

1. I searched the entire specification of SMuFL but could not find
anything about a volta. IMHO this is quite a common construct in sheet
music so I would love to know if I either missed something or if there
is a reason that SMuFL does not specify anything for it (the volta
"bracket" or the repeat numbers such as "1.-3., 5." written under that
"bracket" - I am asking for the latter as there is a glyph for way more
exotic stuff in in SMuFL - not only for every digit of the metre or a
tuplet, including inversed notations but also Kahnotation or whatever
exotic stuff I have never seen in my life and most probably will never
use in my life as musician)?

2. Maybe I just scanned the SMuFL specification (but already know a lot
about Unicode from my work) that is quite complex, but when I found
things like combining characters to start and end beams or slurs my
highest expecations came up: I thought that I could use this to delegate
all the complex computation of rendering beam-groups and slurs to the
typesetting system by just concatenating according glyphs and rendering
text. However, when I tried this on Android or other technologies (I
even used MS word), I never got any effect from these combining
characters. What are these combining characters for? Can you actually
use combining characters to raise or lower notes, connect flagged notes
with beams by just putting beam start and beam end arround them, etc.?

3. Is there anybody interested in my concrete project? Could a simple
text based music format also be of interest for W3C?

I would be happy about any feedback - even if just a partial answer to
one of my questions or any link that might be helpful.

p.s.: Just in case anybody here is a Java developer and wants to have a
look at my code - I am also happy about any kind of feedback.

Kind regards
   Jörg



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